Prom and Prejudice (6 page)

SkiBunnyAlli:
was it good?

SkiBunnyAlli:
G, u still there?

GeeBee:
still here. it was very good. but he has a girlfriend.

SkiBunnyAlli:
no way. so u started the kissing? not him?

GeeBee:
yes. i admit it.

SkiBunnyAlli:
bad girl :)

GeeBee:
i know it! i really like him now. i didn’t understand some things before.

SkiBunnyAlli:
so go kiss him again! jump his bones, girl.

GeeBee:
i’m not that kind of girl.

SkiBunnyAlli:
*sigh*

GeeBee:
tell me about it.

Allie has to go somewhere with her mom then so we signed off, which was okay. Life in Boulder seems eons past now and I need to figure out how I can avoid Michael in homeroom, and English class, bio, and the world in general from now on. I can just imagine that he is thinking that I am obviously much more like Cassie than he had thought I was and he must be thoroughly disgusted with me. I don’t even talk to Tori about it, even though I know she is dying to find out what I did at Michael’s house. But I can’t face telling her—even her. I’m too ashamed.

Sunday evening, I sit on the back porch calculating that I can probably skip homeroom with an excuse that I had an early dentist appointment, and then just blow off English and bio entirely because we don’t have anything due. As I try to strategize the rest of the week—and the semester—I watch a bunch of squirrels chase each other around this bush, chattering their little grey heads off. They appear to be no more sensible than I am but it looks like they are a lot happier.

Tori bursts onto the porch then, waving Trey’s phone at me.

“You
have
to read Trey’s texts from Michael,” she yells as Trey appears behind her, grinning from ear to ear like a manic Ken doll.

“Oh, no. No way. I can
not
deal with that.”

“George, it’s all good,” she insists, thrusting the iPhone in its New England Patriots cover at me.

Trey to Michael Sunday, May 12, 7:11 P.M.

GB borrowed my car to go c u. What she say?

Michael to Trey Sunday, May 12, 7:11 P.M.

She jumped me in the woods! :)

“Oh, God,” I groan, sinking onto the steps and trying to at least be grateful that Michael had used the happy face emoticon. Use of the tongue-sticking-out-in-disgust emoticon might have killed me.

“Keep going,” Tori commands and Trey keeps grinning. He puts his hand on Tori’s shoulder and she snuggles into his chest as if she were moving in there for life.

Trey to Michael Sunday, May 12, 7:12 P.M

LOL jumped in a good way?

Michael to Trey Sunday, May 12, 7:12 P.M

the best way

Trey to Michael Sunday, May 12, 7:13 P.M

she wants u man

Michael to Trey Sunday, May 12, 7:13 P.M

she hates me

Trey to Michael Sunday, May 12, 7:13 P.M

dude, she kissed u !!

Trey to Michael Sunday May 12, 7:15 P.M.

u still there?

Michael to Trey Sunday May 12, 7:15 P.M.

yes

Trey to Michael Sunday May 12, 7:17 P.M.

u 2 geniuses @ love deserve each other. LOL

Michael to Trey Sunday May 12, 7:18 P.M.

so now what?

Trey to Michael Sunday May 12, 7:18 P.M.

it’s up 2 u dude.

“He thinks I hate him,” I say. “How is this ‘all good’?”

“Because he’s wanted you to bust a move for a long time,” Trey laughs. “And you did! He’s a little slow, but I think he’s actually getting the message that you
don’t
hate him.”

He takes his phone from me and looks at Tori like a puppy who has performed “sit” right but doesn’t get a treat.

“We thought you’d be happy,” Tori says.

“I don’t think this changes anything, that’s all.”

She frowns at me for a second, starts to say something, then sighs. She takes Trey’s hand and says to me pointedly, “It’s up to you, dude.” She and Trey walk away hand in hand, clearly weary of my neurotic stupidity.

I don’t blame them.

***

As she catches me on the way out of the school building on Monday, Shondra demands, “Where were you at lunch? And English?”

“Oh, I just had a headache and didn’t want to deal...”

She readjusts her kente cloth messenger bag on her shoulder and says, “Michael wasn’t in class either.”

“Really?” I sound way too intrigued by this, because I heard he had missed homeroom, too. But I had seen him down the hallway third period, so I know he was in school today. He must
really
want to avoid me, too. Great.

“Yeah, really,” Shondra laughs at my intense interest in this tidbit of information. “You can have my notes, if you want.”

“Thanks.”

She rubs the toe of her sandal in the concrete for a moment as the hordes of students surge by us on the front steps on their way to sports practice or to their cars.

“Los and I are going to prom Saturday,” she says. “Did I tell you?”

“No! That’s great! Tori’s going, and Cassie, with some basketball player who apparently can handle her notoriety.”

“I don’t want to go to
his
prom—too stuffy—so he’s coming to ours. You should go with Michael, and then the four of us could go together,” she declares, looking me right in the eye to dare me to try to avoid this suggestion.

“He’s going with Darien,” I say quietly as a large guy in a Red Sox t-shirt pushes past me and bonks me with his tuba case.

“Darien Drake?” Shondra repeats. “She’s a senior, right? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

She looks at me funny for a moment but just shrugs. “I gotta go meet the bus,” she says. “I’ll see ya tomorrow. You’ll be there, right?”

I nod because I really don’t have a choice unless I drop out of school altogether, which may not be the worst idea I’ve ever had. Especially when you consider the sheer volume of monumentally bad ideas I’ve had lately.

As I walk home by myself, I wonder why Michael would be avoiding me, if that’s why he blew off class and homeroom. Why would
he
be avoiding
me
, when I am the one who made a total ass of myself?

I can only conclude that it is because I am so loathsome.

But if I am so loathsome, why did he put a little smiley face in his text after the news that I had kissed him? Because it’s so hilarious? As I cross the street, I reach the undeniable conclusion that Michael is too noble a person to text back and forth with another guy about some stupid deluded girl who had the nerve to kiss him. He just wouldn’t make fun of anyone like that, even me. In fact, Michael Endicott may be kind of snotty—I’m not entirely wrong about that—but he doesn’t make fun of people. Not like I do. Not like I made fun of him.

I stop in my tracks on the other side of the fence where my neighbors’ twin West Highland terriers are bouncing and climbing on each other with impatience for me to pet them because it hit me:

Oh my God.
I’m
the asswaffle.

I sink to my knees and let the grateful little white terriers lick away all of my sins. I wish they were tall enough to lick away the tears.

So the next morning, I march into homeroom with my head held high, ready to face anything because I deserve, after all of my asswafflery, to have to face just about anything Michael can do to me. But he isn’t there. I sit there like a rock during the morning announcements, and look out at the budding trees and turn to a familiar mental game.

We’ve moved so many times for my dad’s job that sometimes, when I’m in a place that has slowly become familiar, I can get an involuntary flash of what it looked like the first time I saw it. Driving down a road, sitting on my bed reading, looking out a window into a yard—I’ll see it, suddenly, as I saw it for the first time, I’ll feel it as I felt it then, and I try to keep that feeling of unfamiliarity going for as long as possible.

And it happens this morning in homeroom. All at once, I don’t see the trees newly green with popping leaves. I see them ready to turn color as they were in September, and I work to try to see everything around me through September eyes, to see what it looked like back then for as long as I can.

I see the whiteboards with layers of faded equations and assignments that never fully erase; I see Mr. Mullin with his bald head like Mr. Clean; I see all of my classmates as if I don’t know them (which is still true, for most of them). And I remember Michael, his dark head bent over a book. He’s only bowed slightly; nothing compromises Michael’s posture. I smile a little when I remember how stiff and ludicrously formal he had seemed on that first day, correcting Mr. Mullin that he was “Michael” and not “Mike,” and our stupid tussle over which seat was his. I remember liking his hair, though, with its wild twists, and thinking that it looked like John Mayer’s on his first CD cover.

And then I remember that it had been his first day at Longbourne, too, after leaving Pemberley.

Maybe he
had
been just as nervous as I was, just like Tori had suggested that day when I’d complained about him. I’d dismissed that idea because he had seemed so sure of himself, then, so disdainful of everybody else, but maybe he had felt awkward,
in
side, even if it didn’t show on the outside. Maybe he had told Mr. Mullin that he was Michael and not Mike, not to be superior and to let us know it, but because he wanted us to know who he is. Because he
is
a Michael. Thoroughly. So not a Mike.

Even if he thinks I’m an idiot, I need to tell him that I get it now, that I get all of it, finally. That I get him.

He’s in English class today but we have an essay exam, so I miss any chance of saying anything to him then. I have a hard time focusing on the test and not looking at the curls on the back of Michael’s neck three rows away. We have to write about William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations on Immortality” which is all about looking back at your childhood and all that you leave behind and the ways that you can hold on to it as an adult. I wonder why adults always think youth is such a wonderful time, “the days of splendor in the grass.” They probably just don’t remember what it was really like. My pen moves in fits and starts for the whole period, and Michael finishes early and leaves the classroom.

In bio class we have another exam, and desperate as I am to speak to him, if Miss Grogan caught anyone whispering or looking at anything other than the exam papers, she would have them pinned to one of the dissection trays and flayed. So after school I hang around awhile near his locker, but I have just missed him, so I just shuffle on home, where the only subject of conversation is the prom, again. Cassie and Tori have already bought their dresses, and while I am making everyone some veggie chili for dinner, Leigh comes into the kitchen and tells me sort of sheepishly that’s she’s going with Alistair.

“Leigh, I think that’s great!” I say, even though it was easier to handle when I wasn’t the only dateless dork in the family.

She scoops a spoonful of the chili and tastes it, nodding approvingly.

“I called him a couple days ago and asked him,” she says when she takes a seat at the little table and clears Cassie’s book bag and socks and magazines out of the way. She shrugs and smiles self-consciously. “I figured that if I asked him to the prom and he said ‘No,’ then I’d at least know where we stand...I guess I couldn’t take not knowing how he felt, even if I wasn’t sure how
I
felt.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I say, and she looks surprised for a moment. “So how
do
you feel?”

“Well, I’m glad we’re going, and I’m glad that he was glad I called. We disagree on some serious stuff, but we also agree on a lot of things, important things. So...I don’t know.”

“It’s probably always like that when you’re with someone. Not that I’d know.”

“Oh, George,” Leigh says, and her eyes are so round and full of sympathy that I feel like I am going to cry. “I know you thought we would hang out together on prom night, go to a movie or something—”

“Please!” I practically shout, waving my hands at her to prevent her from hugging me or starting a telethon for the chronically unlovable. “Don’t even think about it. Go with Alistair and have a good time and bring home embarrassing stories about people I don’t like. Like ‘Willow Harper falls into a punch bowl and reveals that all of that hair has been a wig all along.’ Or ‘Darien Drake catches on fire somehow’—I would love to hear that.”

Leigh laughs and doesn’t even look guilty about it.

Mom comes in and smiles at us, saying to Leigh, “So where are we going dress shopping tonight?”

“I don’t care. The mall, I guess.”